Elite IV Still In The Works

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According to reports leaking out of the GameCity event in Nottingham, UK, David Braben is still working on Elite IV. The game showed up on a slide during his presentation, with the nomenclature “PC, PS3, Xbox 360” next to it. That suggests that the fourth freeform space epic might not be too far off.

It’s not the first time this has come up, of course, as it was first mooted back in 2000, when Braben apparently dabbled with the idea of Elite being an MMO, but shelved the notion due to fear of MMO technological immaturities. Then there was some minor Elite IV rumblings in 2006 during Braben’s first press outings for The Outsider which, damnably, is not coming out on PC. Apparently Braben’s team will be able to use what they’ve learned from the proposed 2009 release of The Outsider in the development of a fourth Elite game. Funny that, when most development teams still haven’t learned from what Elite did in 1984.

And it’s just occurred to me that most of our American readers won’t have a clue who David Braben is, or why we’re excited about Elite… will they? Hmm. Not much we can do to fix that, other than perhaps link to the OpenGL version of Frontier and say that Elite started many of us on the long road towards being the boring old nerds we are today.

23 Comments

Give them yankees some credit, or at least the larger definition of North Americans. My first encounter with Elite was while I was living in Canada. Once I’d become practiced at docking with those ridiculously quick, rotating space stations, I was smitten. Picking up cargo was another skill that took time to acquire. Ah, what halcyon days.

Old news, Braben disclosed it in a lecture at the London Science Museum. He mentioned it had been in development for years and was pretty much put on hold because they needed to push out a new title to fund development on it.

Also, if we’re talking Elite 4 and what people have learnt, we may as well mention Infinity, a standalone game linked with such buzzwords as “procedural”, “MMO”, “Elite”, etc. There are a bunch of videos out from the team and there’s even an early combat prototype download for it.

You know i’ve been watching the infinity webpage for a while now and always had a thought waht if this is Elite 4 in disguise. The coder of Infinity is a Genius and would not surprise me if he might actually be David Braben!

not only do i as an american know about elite…
i am mildly obsessed with it..
i was stationed at Chicksands RAF back in the 90s
i played elite back in college. i could blame it for flunking (but i wont).
i found elite :frontier while stationed in that fine alcohol soaked nation of yours. The amiga i had was ntsc. i sent a polite postcard to an address i found in cambridge for D.braben and got an extremely kind hand written note back from his wife saying he would get an ntsc copy out to me when they got their international translation issue fixed.
id like to frame it but i think that would just prove that im a a bit nutty.
i sell dvds on amazon under the name of cmdrjameson.
i check the frontier website alot for new videos for “the outsider” because i know the tech used there will be used in elite 4.
waiting is the hardest part.

I’m an American and certainly know who David Braben is. Then again, I also know what proper football is. Elite was released in the US by “Firebird Software” I think. I still have the box (as well as the boxes for Frontier and F:FE) in my attic.

That being said, I won’t believe that Elite IV is coming until I actually hold it in my hands. I think it’s been vapo(u)rware longer than DNF.

giblethead2000: The X series is a close competitor, true, but not nearly a spiritual successor. If you want to spend months painstakingly building a corprate trading empire, while occasionally shooting a few pesky, revenue-threatening bad guys, this is the game for you. I defer to Mr Gillen’s PC-Gamer review of X-Beyond the Frontier, one line of which I can quote/paraphrase entirely from memory:

“the worst thing about X:BTF is that it makes you workaaaaaargh”

Plus, I hate the ‘town-square’ sectors with their NSEW jump-gates, reliance on jump-gates to get anywhere (yes, even with the jump-drive, which simply lets you use a number of gates in sequence in one go), the window-dressing planets…

I played Elite back in the days of yore on my best mate’s 6502 Commodore 64 – it was a never-ending source of frustration that it wasn’t available on my 6502 Atari. I loved that game and shall have to get the x86 version to give it a go.
It will make a fine addition to Angband, I think.